The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to phase detection and coding gains. Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communications system may include a number of base stations, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple mobile devices. Base stations may communicate with mobile devices on downstream and upstream links. Each base station has a coverage range, which may be referred to as the coverage area of the cell. A transmitter (e.g., a base station) and a receiver (e.g., a mobile device) may include, respectively, components for signal transmissions and signal reception. For example, the transmitter and receiver may each include one or more oscillators. These oscillators may not be in sync with one another, and may have inherent imperfections. As a result, phase noise may be introduced into the received signal. This noise may create difficulties for the receiver to correctly determine the phase for symbols transmitted to the receiver. Currently, phase error is determined by performing hard decisions on the received symbols themselves. However, due to the noisy conditions at the receiver, this hard decision may regularly be incorrect. To improve hard decisions, known pilot sequences are inserted into a stream of data symbols. The use of pilot sequences however, reduces the number of symbols that are available to carry data. Thus, the coding rate of the data stream is increased in order to maintain a desired level of data throughput.